Colonialism is extractive in nature. Spanish settlers in the Americas during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries viewed Indigenous labor as a resource ripe for the taking. Beginning with the earliest conquest endeavors, conquistadors forced Indigenous women into sexual slavery and roadside domestic labor. As battlefields gave way to fledgling settlements in the patchwork colonization of the Americas, Spaniards sought to harness the labor of the Indigenous peoples under their authority. The New Laws of 1542 limited the most flagrant violations against Native peoples by placing severe restrictions on Indigenous slavery and the encomienda, a grant to Native tribute and labor. In the decades following the application of the New Laws, the Crown and its authorities throughout the Americas developed institutions that hinged on coercive labor. Several of these institutions—the encomienda, personal service (servicio personal), the repartimiento, the mita—shaped colonial economies and Indigenous labor practices for centuries to come. This panel explores coercive labor systems from the perspectives of the colonial authorities who imposed them, the Indigenous men and women who labored within them, and the individuals who recorded aspects of them, thereby leaving a paper trail with traces in modern archives.

The panel contributes to scholarship on coercive labor, bondage, and slavery in the Atlantic World by examining the function of colonial labor systems and cases of Indigenous slavery within the context of colonial Yucatan. As a region on the periphery of Spain’s Atlantic Empire, the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico presents a unique case study for scholarship on coercive labor. The formation of a Spanish colony in Yucatan was a protracted affair, Maya men and women fled into the brush when the burdens of colonialism grew too great, and parts of the Yucatan Peninsula remained in Maya hands well into the seventeenth century. The papers on this panel highlight the trafficking of Mesoamerican women during early conquest incursions, the coercive domestic labor that Maya women performed in multiethnic colonial households, and interpreters’ roles as both communicators and agents of coercive labor structures in the seventeenth century. Our goal is to further discussions of coercive labor, slavery, and dependency during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the period when Spain began to consolidate its hold on Mesoamerica.